I first met Gabriele Arruzzo in 2003. His work was on view in a group show curated by Luca Beatrice and Guido Curto, entitled At least 16 minutes (slightly longer than the ephemeral celebrity prophesized by Andy Warhol). The exhibition was at the Galleria Art & Arts, an art gallery that was rather short-lived. Arruzzo’s work was inspired by the triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (c. 1944) and, since Bacon had been the subject of my dissertation a few years before, it captured my attention. We talked about it for a long time, in the street.

We haven’t had many chances to meet again since then, but we have kept in touch quite regularly. What I found, and still find interesting about Arruzzo is the perseverance of his investigation – I mean his painting, his treasured subjects, his technical obsessions and the meticulous study of objects. I am fascinated by his anachronism, his infinite love for Piero della Francesca that gained him a teaching position at Urbino Academy, where I was personally a witness to his students’ devotion – all the more anachronistic in the glamorous scenery of Italian art, where being a painter doesn’t help, even less so if you are an educated painter.

Should anyone have doubts about that, I recommend the small but valuable catalogue of his previous solo exhibition in Milan in 2015 at the Galleria Giuseppe Pero. Alongside an interesting introduction by Alberto Zanchetta, the catalogue contains many pages, photocopied or underlined, from books covering the most diverse fields of knowledge –Piero della Francesca, Dürer, and Malevič, as well as anthropology, art criticism, theology and history. All this precipitates chemically in a cycle of works, collected under the title Apocalypse with Figures, which could safely dispense with all those theoretical references.

In my opinion, this is what good painting is about – building solid foundations and making its understanding in-essential. It goes without saying that such inessentiality does not rule out the possibility to explore those foundations, in order to try to solve – or, at least, to look with deeper awareness at – Arruzzo’s paintings, which Ivan Quaroni has aptly dubbed “visual oxymorons” (see Laboratorio Italia. Nuove tendenze in pittura, Johan and Levi, Milan 2007, p. 24).

This is one more evidence of the goodness of his work: his paintings speak by themselves about themselves; they produce an effect of estrangement not only on visual perception - which could well suffice - but also on the intellect, thus making it possible to engage in a dialogue with them, and desire to learn a language capable of establishing a two-way communication (at least virtually), and try to not simply listen to the work but also respond to it. It’s the famous – in fact, sometimes infamous – twofold reading, which must not by any means be taken as a merit ranking.

All this is true also for the new cycle of works, Arcadia. Two years of work which, believe me, have truly absorbed the artist, who has revolutionized his working method. Surely, in a work like Arruzzo’s, revolutions never have a radical, Copernican scope, which does not mean they are inconsequential. This time Arruzzo worked alone, unassisted. His method of working has changed: if once he started from a clear general plan which he then transposed onto a canvas by drawing the outlines and then filling them with colours, now he ‘plays it by ear’ according to a less well-defined plan, which turns the drawing and the colours into independent variables.

The result is under your eyes and, however vaguely you may remember the 2015 works, you cannot miss a crucial difference: the staticity of previous paintings has given way to an unprecedented mobility thanks to a kind of abstract basis, “redefined in view of its alleged figurative aim,” as the artist himself puts it (the most obvious example is represented by untitled (peasant girl)).

Technique is not the only area of experimentation. The choice of subjects has equally been affected by a sea change. If in Apocalypse with Figures Arruzzo’s attention was focused on the ongoing tragic geo-political tensions in our planet, in his recent work any intimation of current affairs, even in the most subtle of forms, has disappeared. Or, better, it has sunk. It’s a comeback to the fundamentals, which, it seems to me, is in accordance with director Christine Macel’s choices in the latest edition of the Venice Biennale. However, Arruzzo makes his comeback a radical one, as is apparent in the title Arcadia as well as in a profusion of topoi, rhetorical-pictorial stereotyped figures – the painter working en plein air (it is hardly necessary to highlight the allusion to Paolini), the painter and his model, the little shepherd and shepherdess, the peasant girl and even the kitten.

Is this a sign of the final solution of that visual oxymoron Quaroni was talking about? Rather the opposite, actually. In fact, the dark colours surface once again, at times harsh (a season in limbo (night never ends inside myself)), at times more subtly uncanny (the acid-coloured pyramids peeping through the boughs in untitled (little shepherdess) and untitled (little shepherd) are obvious examples of Unheimlichkeit, i.e. something that unsettles a familiar context or scene.

This is where we can find the common ground to all of Arruzzo’z works, including the latest innovations of Arcadia: the nostalgia that speaks through the bucolic subjects is a nostos, a homecoming marred by the fact that the familiar, reassuring haven has never existed. “The great English landscape painting developed at a time when the fog mixed with the smoke of chimneys was so thick you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face,” as the artist aptly puts it. What can be more Unheimlich than something familiar unsettled by a small but telling system error than the ghost-like character of that house in which that familiarity was supposed to have taken place?

Meanwhile, in golden garden (observing oneself while observing), the landscape turns red, the model looks away and the flight paths of leaves and birds take the shape of a tag.

Biasutti & Biasutti Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition dedicated to the Piedmontese painter Piero Ruggeri (1930 - 2009), who after his studying at Accademia Albertina in Turin, together with Giacomo Soffiantino and Sergio Saroni, gave birth to the Informal painting, be inspired by De Staël, Bacon, De Kooning and Kline, but also by Wols, Appel and Jorn. A “naturalistic informal painting”, never betrayed or, as Angelo Mistrangelo writes in his critical text of the exhibition’s catalogue: “a re-interpreted, reconsidered, redefined naturalism with a vigorous, powerful sign”. These signs, which ripple the matter, are the real protagonists of the works. The exhibition will focus on mixed media techniques on paper and oils on canvas that will span the course of Ruggeri’s career from 1958 to 2002. “Natura morta” (1958/59) and “Figura nel paesaggio” (1959), opening the show, point out the artist’s intense relationship with Nature, with his first faint mysterious presences, characterizing his works belonging to the Sixties, as “Anna 2” (1962). The series of the Roveti (bushes), describing some places near Battagliotti, where Ruggeri lived, reveals an instant, excited painting. “Iridescenze 2” (1975) well represents this period, defined by Mistrangelo like “an alternate of tiles in a fragmentary mosaic”, together with an explosion of color in the vastness of the canvas. From the second half of the Eighties, the series of the monochroms, are characterized by the quality, the intensity and the color’s veining, as the works “Senza titolo” (1988) and “Contamine” (1989); also the titles of his following works remark definitely a chromatic reference, built primarily by the artist, and felt like a desire of immersing himself in the pictorial spaces: “Luce rossa” (1990), “Rosso rosso” (1991) and “Paesaggio nero” (1995). The matter and infinite signs are distinctive features of “La frana du lac” (2000) and “La pundrà” (2002), which chronologically close the exhibition.

The title of this exhibition project (which will take place in October 2017) refers to a kind of drawing that renounces the support of a chosen model (something “real”, a tangible object), and addresses an image that is invisible - or visible only to its creator, suspended in the air – and elusive, relating to an intangible but equally real entity pertaining, in the broad sense, to one's perceptual scope. There are many possibilities and many different areas where it is possible for the visionary drawer (or drawer of visions) to tap into this mode, and each of the three artists participating in the exhibition (still in the planning phase) represents one of the areas of these possibilities quite well.
For a long time now, Miki Yui has established her own mode - perhaps more existential than strictly artistic – which frequently, though discontinuously, consists of a quick and often almost feverish attempt (it must be done soon, the image is fading just like and even faster than a ray of sunshine filters through shutters into a house) to retain fragments of her dreams, some of which are recurring. Upon awakening in the morning, Miki often makes sketches, in a little book she keeps for this purpose, of the images of her interrupted dream whose shapes, colors, sounds, and odors still revolve around her for a few seconds. She sometimes does this a little while after she has woken up, and it is more accurate since the memory of it still persists with clarity. But the drawings made upon awakening must be instantaneous, for the stronger her perception of the dream is, the more rapidly it fades away. And so Miki also uses words which, at times, seem to be better able to synthesize an image that is both powerful and elusive.
Saverio Tonoli Adamo often resorts to a kind of drawing that is similar to Yui's, but differs in many respects. In the series of drawings made at the beach in the summer, there is a strong light all around him (these beaches are in Italy or Spain), which seems to exclude any vision other than that of the hyper-realistic landscape surrrounding him. Saverio makes use of pebbles that he collects on the beach or shore, as well as the sand itself, and these tangible elements of the landscape help trigger the occurrence of a transcendent experience from which intensely colorful drawings materialize (colors that Saverio might not have seen there, in those moments) which seem to suggest incomprehensible or unclassifiable forms, while the only evidence left of the pebbles or sand (these “catalysts of vision”) is their absence, or disappearance, which thereby represents them.
Loren Chasse also makes his drawings outdoors, extemporaneously, and it is some real phenomenon (a form, a sound, a light effect, or any sudden and unexpected situation) that gives impetus to his imagination, and he makes an attempt to represent something that is suddenly and uncontrollably made manifest within himself, almost synchronous with that phenomenon. Chasse often does not complete a drawing, in order to leave room for what cannot (or is best not to) be represented, or which could be represented only by resorting to a pretense. That which would sap the drawing's vital energy and his ability to capture a plausible trace of the phenomenon (inside/outside of himself) without presuming to have caught it, or killing it, like prey. When the epiphany takes place, in Loren Chasse's own words regarding the result of these actions, which are always very rapid and unprepared and created by using any materials at hand, “what I get is an apparition with but a small foot in this world”.

'Fondante' starts from the desire to invite few international artists of last generation to relate to an institution of the city of Turin: Museo della frutta, which in 2017 celebrates 10 years of opening into the building of Via Pietro Giuria 15, in the popular district of San Salvario. The show includes some interventions inside the historical rooms of the venue, with works elaborated with a relevant themes of nature and organic matters (in particular fruits) placed in close relation with the environments hosting them.
The aim is to give a new reading of the work done by 1800’s artist and artisan Francesco Garnier Valletti and his sublime technique of reproduction, by including works that will be adapted to the venue, between documents, photographs, tools and artificial fruits part of original exhibition path, with paintings, sculptures and artworks created or adapted for the occasion.
The project is divided in eight chapters, presented on a bi-weekly timing between June and September, to introduce the artworks into the museum step by step, creating a dynamic dialogue. The exhibition will be completed and visible entirely, only with the last chapter, and could be visited until the beginning of November as a contribution for the art week of Turin.
As corollary of the exhibition, some texts will be elaborated by critics, curators or friends invited by the artists to complete each action.

Sven Drühl investigates and re-elaborates Modern and Contemporary Art History’s landscapes and architectural designs. In his paintings and in the works with neon lights he alludes to already existing artworks by other artists such as Caspar David Friedrich, Ferdinand Hodler or by fellow contemporary artists.
He works on the landscape in a nonconventional way, employing silicone and latex in addition to traditional materials, giving three-dimensionality to the canvas.
During the last decade he intensely worked following the Japanese New Print Movement, known as Shin Hanga, which originated during the 1910s in Japan. In this last series of works he undertakes a new artistic method inspired by virtuality and videogames textures, reproducing landscapes which look like they are entirely real.
As it happens with textures in computer graphics, in his artworks the artist follows a mathematical structure; the composition is well organized and the pattern repetition is cyclic. The canvas follow a clear strictness and his technique creates more detailed and realistic landscapes by working on lines and shading. The expression and the signs of the lines make sense when hit by light because they come alive and the individual details, from simple quotes, produce new landscapes.

Artissima is Italy’s leading contemporary art fair, renowned for its focus on the most innovative artistic research. Over the years it has tapped artists and future trends, rediscovered the great pioneers of the past and tested exhibition formats that have then been adopted around the world. This – and the fact that it is held in Torino, a hub of Italy’s culinary excellence – has helped make it a prime rendezvous on the global art scene.